Wang Mingqi. Projection
Team on the Lake. Cut-paper
illustration by a projectionist
of an open-air screening.
From Dianying fangying
(Film projection), Non. 3 (1965).

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6

https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00307

The Hot Noise of
Open-Air Cinema

JIE LI

In the quiet night of the countryside, when the roar of the
generator thundered and the light of the projector pierced
the dark, vast sky, the sleepy village awakened into hustle
and bustle: kids’ tussling and screaming, parents’ shouts
in search of their children, the laughter of young men and
women were all intertwined into a pastoral symphony.

—Tan Hanxin, “Open Air Cinema”1

For my generation, cinema is the gatekeeper of our memory
lane, the core and pivot of our childhood lives. When this
gate is opened, all the smells and flavors of that vanished
era will assault one’s senses: roasted sunflower seeds, le
unique scorched flavor of pumpkin seeds, the aroma of
dust and rain, the scent of women’s vanishing cream, le
odor of petroleum emanating from the generator, the smell
of mysterious nights of distant moon and stars.

—Ge Fei, “Village Cinema”2

Depuis 1949 à 1983, the film exhibition network in the People’s
Republic of China developed from fewer than six hundred movie
theaters to some 162,000 film projection units, mostly mobile
movie teams conducting open-air screenings in rural areas.3 Such
an expansive media infrastructure helped the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) unite and mobilize a vast, diverse populace behind
its utopian visions. In this sense, the Chinese Revolution was a
media revolution. But were the Chinese people passive recipi-
ents of state propaganda? What was the experience of cinema like
at the grass roots? What did the exhibition contexts contribute to the
memory and nostalgia of those who came of age in socialist China?
Parsing the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—
with which grassroots audiences engaged with cinema beyond
the film, this article argues that the multisensory environment
of the screening space can contribute as much to the reception of
cinema as the content of the films themselves. I synthesize and
theorize these extrafilmic visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, et
haptic experiences of moviegoing as “hot noise.” A key concept
of Chinese popular religion, theater, and markets, “hot noise”
describes the festive ambience generated through an assembly of
warm bodies, a polyphony of participatory voices, and a kaleido-

Grey Room 81, Fall 2020, pp. 6–35. © 2020 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

7

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scope of sense impressions. As open-air cinema grew into a quin-
tessential form of public life under Chinese socialism, its hot
noise also contributed to a politics of mobilization and an eco-
nomics of austerity, thereby challenging existing understandings
of cinema’s relationship to the senses and to the masses.

Film scholars have long connected the beginnings of cinema
to the invention of a new modern sensorium, from Siegfried
Kracauer’s depiction of Berlin’s picture palaces as a “total artwork”
that “assaults all our senses” to Walter Benjamin’s accounts of
how urban industrial modernity altered modes of human percep-
tion.4 In the Chinese context, Zhang Zhen shows how 1920s
and 1930s Shanghai cinema contributed to a new sensorium that
“helped absorb, deflect, and overcome the shocks and stress of
modern life.”5 Not only film texts but movie theaters, amusement
halls, parks, cafés, and dance halls came together in “a complex
ecology of material conditions and sociocorporeal relations”
that constituted what Leo Ou-fan Lee calls the “urban milieu of
Shanghai cinema.”6 Weihong Bao also highlights the “mediating
environment” of Chinese cinema of the 1920s to the 1940s, dub-
bing it an “affective medium” that acted on the sensory reflex of
its spectators.7

Yet the vast majority of China’s population lived in rural areas
until the 1990s and would not have encountered cinema until
the 1950s, when the CCP systematically sent out mobile film
units to every county and township. More than entertainment
and distraction, these mobile film units were tasked with labor
mobilization and “socialist distant horizon education.”8 In the
1950s, they showed both imported films from the Soviet Union
and a plethora of new domestic productions from film studios
concentrated in Shanghai, Beijing, and Changchun.9 The nation-
wide film exhibition network continued to grow even during the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) with its censorship and suspen-
sion of most feature productions, so that the few sanctioned
“revolutionary model works” (yangbanxi) were screened repeat-
edly along with newsreels and imported films from China’s allies.
A folk saying from the 1970s captures the period’s cinematic diet:
“Chinese films, documentary newsreels; Vietnamese films,
airplanes and cannons; North Korean films, weep weep, smile
smile; Romanian films, hugs and kisses; Albanian films, baffling
and bizarre.”10

Even more than what they watched, cependant, audiences hold
vivid memories of where they watched films. Since the Chinese
countryside had little infrastructure devoted to film exhibition,
screenings took place mostly in open air, and the “environment”
for cinema was more “natural” than “built,” more improvised
than designed. Even urban Chinese primarily encountered films
in open-air screenings in nontheatrical venues such as school,

8

Grey Room 81

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work unit, and military courtyards from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The open-air screenings intensified the audience’s physical
memories of cinema thanks to their embodied interactions with
the material spaces of film exhibition. These screenings also
demand critical reconsiderations of cinema’s relationship to the
masses—not in terms of industrial capitalism but of state social-
ism. How did mobile cinema reconfigure the sensorium of grass-
roots China and contribute to the making of socialist subjects?
And how might extrafilmic sensory engagements go against or
beyond state orchestration?

Studying extrafilmic senses associated with cinemagoing
departs from scholarship on how film texts represent and stimu-
late the senses, whether Laura Marks’s notion of “haptic visuality”
or Vivian Sobchack’s genealogy of the “cinesthetic subject.”11
Instead of hypothetical spectators, this article draws on the rem-
iniscences of former audiences to conduct a historical ethnogra-
phy and critical analysis of Chinese socialist cinema’s multisensory
environment.12 To reconstruct cinema culture “from below,” the
article analyzes “memory-texts” such as memoirs, blogs, oral his-
tories, and written questionnaires, as well as historical docu-
ments, film magazines, contextual sources, and even fictional
works grounded in lived experiences.13

In addition to written sources from more than twenty Chinese
provinces, the article draws on interviews with former projec-
tionists and film audiences conducted from 2012 à 2019.14 Since
contemporary reports and recounted memories are selective and
performative, no single source gives unmediated access to “real
audiences.” Yet personal accounts and creative works can still
provide thick descriptions of the material conditions and diverse
meanings of film exhibition and reception. As Jacqueline Stewart
argues in her study of African American film culture, even literary
fiction has the potential to “bridge the gaps between ‘spectator’
as textual point of address and ‘viewer’ as empirical unit.”15
Adopting Stewart’s “kaleidoscopic approach,” I let the various
sources “address, contradict, and illuminate each other.”16 Taken
ensemble, these idiosyncratic accounts show how cinema did not
hold homogeneous meanings for audience members and that
reception varied greatly depending on the exhibition context.

Socialist China’s mobile and makeshift screening venues and
practices are reminiscent of the itinerant exhibitions of early cin-
ema, whereas its grassroots cinematic experiences resonate with
ethnographic accounts of moviegoing in Africa and South Asia.17
Brian Larkin considers cinemagoing in Nigeria an “affective
practice” that is “sensational in its literal meaning of working on
the body to produce physical effects.”18 Amit Rai analyzes the
“ecologies of sensation” as well as “the unpredictable experience
of the visual, gastric, tactile, and aural pleasure of Hindi-Urdu

Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

9

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film.”19 Similarly, Lakshmi Srinivas writes about an “active audi-
ence” in India whose cinemagoing has been “marked by spon-
taneity, improvisation, and performance” in contrast to “the silent
absorption of film associated with mainstream audiences in Anglo-
American and Western European exhibition (multiplex) settings.”20
Where grassroots cinemagoing in socialist China may stand
apart from other cinema cultures is its intense political charge
and an aesthetics of austerity, which I theorize via the multisen-
sory phrase “hot noise”: at once visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory,
and haptic. Analysis of extrafilmic sights, sounds, les odeurs, taste,
and touch reveals that the coming of the “movie team” consti-
tuted a heightened sensory experience for grassroots audiences
in socialist China beyond the ideological content of the film texts.
As festive occasions for mass congregation, spectacle, bruit,
commensality, intimacy, and nightlife against a backdrop of
poverty, hardship, and dreariness, cinema was a central compo-
nent of Chinese socialist public life. The dialectic between labor
and leisure, aesthetics and anesthetics applied not only to cin-
ema’s place in urban industrial modernity but to its relationship
to Chinese socialism in rural areas.21 Cinema served as both labor
mobilization and respite from labor; film screenings stimulated
and amplified the senses but also implemented austerity mea-
sures through an economy of gratitude. While the state’s aim was
to attract, discipline, and collectivize a scattered population into
“revolutionary masses,” cinema audiences remained an unruly
crowd whose hot noise eluded, even subverted, state control.

Hot Noise
Reminiscences of rural life under socialism often mention cinema
as the “hot and noisy” (renao) event. When I asked Chinese
villagers, especially female elders who spoke only local dialects,
what movies they had seen or liked, they often replied, “Movies?
We just went to ‘watch hot noise’ [kan renao].” Sometimes they
also said “approaching/gathering hot noise” (cou renao), suggérer-
ing that they were not just passive audience members but active
participants in the hustle and bustle. Renao compels us to recon-
ceptualize what we mean by noise: both unwanted sound and
disruption of signal. Jacques Attali’s seminal book Noise argues
that “noise is violence” and “had always been experienced as
destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the
code-structuring messages.” Yet, contrary to his claim that noise
“in all cultures” is “associated with the idea of the weapon, blas-
phemy, plague,” renao—a key concept and critical feature of
Chinese popular religion, theater, and markets—describes what
Adam Chau calls a “sociothermic affect,” a lively, busy, and pros-
perous atmosphere sought after at New Year’s celebrations, wed-
dings, birthday parties, temple fairs, and even funerals.22 An

10 Grey Room 81

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antonym of lengqing, “chilly and desolate,” this amiable, noisy
confusion of enthusiastic human interaction is nothing less
than a celebration of life itself, the yang opposed to the yin in
Chinese cosmology.

Robert Weller dubs Chinese popular religion a “hot and noisy
religion,” whereby a successful large event, “from a market to a
ritual, provides plenty of heat and noise—it should be packed
with people, chaotically boisterous, loud with different voices,
and clashingly colorful.”23 Studying Taiwan’s night markets,
Shuenn-Der Yu highlights renao’s multisensory quality by describ-
ing how vendors attracted customers with bright lighting and
decorations, loud music and sales pitches, smoke and steam,
cluttered spaces, and overflowing wares and food ingredients.24
According to Joshua Goldstein, audiences of Peking opera in
teahouses around the turn of the twentieth century also behaved
like customers of a raucous marketplace by “ignoring the perfor-
mance, chatting, or loudly vocalizing their appreciation or dis-
content.”25 Besides acoustic loudness and polyphony, the market
comparison further underscores the attention economy of hot
noise and its associations with distraction and disruption:

Just as in markets in which customers rarely part with their
economic currency without haggling over and evaluating
the merchandise, so in the teahouse customers did not dole
out their aesthetic currency—their attention—without a
healthy haggle, nor was one expected to keep silent and
still so that others in the crowd could take in the show
undisrupted. Disruption [renao] was part of the fun; en effet,
it was an integral part of the communication between the
audience and the actors.26

While Chinese state socialism suppressed traditional temple
festivals, marchés, and opera, their carnivalesque hot noise was
displaced onto open-air cinema. Cinema’s multisensory hot
noise included the mass assembly of scattered populations, le
pandemonium of participatory voices, as well as the amplifica-
tion and disruption of audiovisual transmission. Cinema as hot
noise was not just the film but a broader sensory environment,
ambience, and vibe. While hot noise interfered with absorption
into the film texts, it could also be the very purpose of the spec-
tacle and the very object of attraction and consumption. Plutôt
of drawing audiences into the film in centrifugal fashion,
Chinese mobile cinema created an electrifying environment that
radiated outward, entangling viewers in a centripetal fashion—
like a disco ball and karaoke microphone-loudspeaker whose
main functions are to emanate light and amplify sound. Le
favorite movies of rural Chinese audiences were often “hot and
noisy” genres such as war films (with their spectacular, loud,

Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

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smoking battles) and opera films (with their gongs and drums
and colorful costumes).27

Rather than noise in the sense of unwanted disruption, Chinese
hot noise has something in common with the emancipatory and
exhilarating ambience of carnivals and bazaars theorized in other
historical and cultural contexts.28 Yet in the Mao era, hot noise
was rarely a site of unofficial culture or commercial exchange
and urban pleasures. Plutôt, socialist open-air cinema—as well
as parades and rallies—were coordinated with political campaigns
as festive gatherings of otherwise scattered grassroots popula-
tions in order to solder them into “the revolutionary masses.”
The staging of such hot and noisy events tapped into some of the
perennial fears and desires of rural Chinese. As Zhang Ning
points out, whereas “urbanites fear clamor and noise,” Chinese
tillers of the land “fear solitude, silence, and death,” which take
on concrete form in their imagination as “wandering ghosts and
spirits.” Those fears underlie everyday gatherings at sunning
grounds, tree shades, and alleyway crossings, as well as collec-
tive rituals at shrines and graves that communicate with the past
and the future.29 Thus the sensorium of hot noise must be under-
stood in dialectical relationship with the sensory austerity of
rural life.

Eyes: Watching Hot Noise
Cinema is above all a visual medium, but cinemagoing has always
meant seeing more than just the films, as Zhiwei Xiao argues:

the site of film exhibition and the entire movie theater
environment—from the ticket booth on the sidewalk to the
posters in the hall, publicity materials in the display win-
dow, crowds in the lobby, and snack bars—all play a crucial
role in shaping the audience’s experience of a given film.30

As William Paul proposes in a study of cinema architecture,
“looking at the container can also offer a way of understanding
its contents.”31 The CCP, keenly aware of films’ exhibition con-
texts as well as their ideological messages, sought to transform
cinema from decadent bourgeois consumption into socialist
mass culture after coming to power in 1949. In addition to swap-
ping Hollywood movies for East-bloc films and Chinese socialist
cinema, the new regime also constructed cinemas, clubs, et
cultural palaces for its “proletariat masses” in the 1950s and
1960s, often stand-alone monuments in industrial districts on
urban peripheries and modeled after Soviet architecture.32 A
1963 Chinese cinema architecture textbook distinguished the
educational mission of cinema in socialist countries from films
as capitalist commodities: cinemas should look “welcoming”
and “vivacious” but not “sumptuous and palatial.” Since socialist

12 Grey Room 81

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cinemas received priority in urban planning, they did not “have
to compete with crammed and colorful storefronts,” nor rely on
“giant brassy signs.”33 Under the socialist order, cinema audi-
ences were no longer admitted on a rolling basis, as was the case
before 1949, but filed into the auditorium at the beginning and
cleared out at the end of every showing. Thus the audience
lounge became an important space decorated with movie posters,
star photos, and film reviews, whereas the box office became less
prominent with advanced group ticket sales and shorter queues.34
Dans l'ensemble, cinema architecture and decorations constitute a promi-
nent portion of the visual experiences and memories of film
audiences in cities, county seats, and some large townships,
where movie theaters were often the highest and grandest archi-
tectural monuments.

Whereas extrafilmic spectacles of movie theater façades and
decorations remained fixtures in the everyday lives of urban
citizens, the coming of the movies marked a carnivalesque event
for rural villagers. Although the projector, projectionist, and elec-
tricity that produce audiovisual images are usually camouflaged
infrastructure in purpose-built cinemas, the itinerant movie
team—their embodied presence and the machines they brought—
were spectacular attractions in the countryside.35 Especially
when encountering cinema for the first time, audiences went to
screenings as much to marvel at the machines as to view the
films.36 Projectionist reports and memoirs from various parts of
China are replete with examples of “bumpkin wonder” at the
electrical miracle of film technology, such as old peasants trying
to light their pipes at the projectionist’s light bulb or audiences
of a war film returning the next morning to look for leftover
artillery, as if they wished to substantiate the cinematic images
before their eyes with the sense of touch.37

After cinema stopped being a novelty by the 1970s, the com-
ing of a movie team to a village remained a special yet uncertain
event, augured by the sighting of the cart transporting equipment
or a villager shoveling holes to erect bamboo poles to hang the
screen. Such sights unleashed a swift wind of rumors that trav-
eled to neighboring villages, followed by scores or even hun-
dreds of individual decisions about whether to hike to the movie,
decisions that would take account of distance, road and weather
conditions, the company, and the availability of torches and
moonlight. The rumors might not be true, so the sight of fellow
travelers accumulating from other villages along the way, quelques
holding flashlights, was reassuring.38 Sometimes rural audiences
traveled a long way only to see a “white cloth film” when the
projector or generator broke down. Even when screenings went
smoothly, audiences often watched a blank screen during the
changing of the reels or when waiting for copy runners to arrive.39

Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

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In open-air cinema, the screen, as the main architectural addi-
tion to the village, was like a flag, a sail, and a lighthouse all in
un. Because the first film screenings in many parts of rural
China followed the communist victory, hanging up movie
screens was akin to raising flags of territorial conquest. Calling
themselves “vanguards on the cultural front” who “hack through
brambles and thorns” to “spread the seed of socialist thought to
the broadest masses of people,” mobile projectionists opened up
“virgin lands” that did not yet know cinema.40 For villagers, le
fixing of the screen was an exciting, participatory spectacle; it
involved stomping on the earth to stabilize the bamboo poles,
tightening the rope that raised the screen, even playing hand
shadows when the projector light turned on.41 Lighting up a dark
firmament, the screen had an enchanted quality, “enveloping
thousands of troops,” magnifying tiny insects, drawing the far
près, conjuring the past, and divining the future.42 Some com-
pared the screen to a sailboat that navigated audiences across an
ocean of dreams.43 And if, in the words of a hosanna to Chairman
Mao, “Sailing the Sea Depends on the Great Helmsman,” then
Mao’s translucent image on the screen provided both the illusion
of live presence and summoned otherwise dispersed villagers
into a congregation at his beck and call. In this sense, the screen
was a lighthouse that provided orientation and anchor in the
midst of Mao’s “revolutionary wind and waves.”

Real wind blowing the screen, cependant, gave a twist to the
metaphor of the sail, as the screen itself became distorted and
film characters took on grotesque grimaces and warped bodies.44
Bending the very surface of the screen, the wind created out of
didactic film texts unpredictable comedy, farce, and a sense of the
uncanny. Shanghai writer Wang Anyi describes in a novella how
students sent to a collective farm in Anhui assembled at the
sounding of a bugle for the screening of a revolutionary ballet film:

The wind blew the screen like a sail on the sea, twisting the
bodies of the characters onscreen so they all looked miser-
capable. Zhao Zhiguo walked from behind the screen toward
the audience. In the wind, the students sat on their backpacks
in phalanx formation. The light and shadow of the screen
reflected off their tanned, solemn, and indistinguishable
faces. . . . The exaggerated gestures of the characters seemed
absurd in this kind of night. The sound of music is engulfed
by the wilderness, but the sound of the wind was omni-
présent, filling the space between sky and earth.45

The film’s visual and auditory signals were not only distorted
by the wind but swallowed up, overpowered, and rendered infin-
itesimal by the sky, the earth, and the air in between. Besides the
wind-blown screen-as-sail and thunderstorms, a major environ-

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mental challenge to open-air screenings was the impact of light
on the film’s visibility. “The absolutely dark theater,” Noam
Elcott argues, “was no less crucial to the experience of cinema
than was the luminous moving image.”46 Since most of rural
China did not have the infrastructural conditions to engineer
“artificial darkness,” the start-time of open-air cinema depended
on nightfall.47 Films on a short rental period might be screened
on the same night in different villages. Par exemple, the revolu-
tionary model opera film Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy was
released in 1970, after four years of paralysis in the film produc-
tion and exhibition sectors. A former soldier stationed in the
Sichuan countryside recalled how her regiment and local villagers
waited from sunset for eight hours before the movie team’s even-
tual arrival. Toward the film’s triumphant climax, the sun began
to rise, leaving at first faint shadows and eventually nothing but
a blank screen, though audience members could still hear the
film’s heroic music and dialogue, as well as the snoring and
laughter of their fellow viewers.48

Even under optimal conditions, open-air screens, often two-
by-three meters or the size of a “two-person blanket,” were tiny
compared to the vast audience. Often those in the back could see
little more than “heads and butts.”49 Reminiscences also mention
the beautiful spectacle of audiences arriving or departing with
flashlights, lanterns, and torches like twinkling stars scattered
across the mountain paths and embankments of the paddies.50
Film audiences looked at one another and compared whose
clothes were newer and prettier and whose clothes were full of
holes with cotton falling out. This heightened consciousness
of the self as spectacle meant that moviegoers often dressed up in
their best clothes. In many instances, cependant, even these were
shabby. Recollections of a sense of pride or shame under the
scrutiny of many eyes was thus for some villagers more memo-
rable than the movie itself.51

Ears and Mouths: Sounding Hot Noise
Besides spectacles for the eyes, cinema’s hot noise also attracted
and assailed the ears. If Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attraction”
originally referred to early silent cinema, Chinese grassroots
cinema featured a “noise of attraction” with loud sounds draw-
ing scattered rural folk. As a former projectionist wrote for the
Qinghai Film Gazetteer, in the early 1950s many Tibetans rode
their horses for tens of kilometers to listen to the movie team’s
phonograph and perchance to sing a local song with their micro-
phone. These audiences could not help but wonder, “How can a
high-hanging wooden box speak in so many voices? . . . [H]ow
can that ‘lon lon’ sounding generator draw electricity from thun-
der and lightning?”52 Since one can better project sound than

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images across wide distances, the sound of the loudspeaker has
been a mainstay of attracting audiences to open-air screenings to
this day.

The noise of attractions was generated not only by the sound-
(concernant)producing and amplifying technologies of gramophones,
microphones, and loudspeakers but by the power generator, le
bulkiest, loudest, and most failure-prone machine brought by the
mobile movie team. Besides lively hot noise, the power generator
also generated disruptive noise that could easily drown out the
film sound. Projectionists thus usually brought a long cable so
the generator could be positioned a good distance from the pro-
jector and loudspeakers. Someone also had to guard the genera-
tor to prevent the accidental electrocution of children running
amok.53 The generators’ frequent breakdowns, along with other
technical problems, contributed to an experience and aesthetics
of “disrepair and noise.” In the case of Nigeria, Larkin describes
a media infrastructure where the blurred images and distorted
sound of pirated videos created a “sensorial experience of media
marked by poor transmission, interference, and noise.”54 Similarly,
Chinese socialist film audiences also associate their filmic recep-
tion with “the noise of the real”—fuzzy, scratched images and
hissing or crackling sounds that had less to do with copying than
with overuse.55 Scratches on celluloid were often an indication
of a film’s popularity and familiarity to audiences, who some-
times spoke memorized dialogue or commented on the plot. Le
snapping of film reels further provoked audiences to boo and
hoot, while children jumped up to fight over the discarded “trea-
sures” of celluloid fragments.56 Thanks to haphazard, makeshift
spaces without fixed seating, sometimes on a slope and often
without clearly defined boundaries, much hullabaloo before and
during a film had to do with frictions over desirable spots to sit
or stand, over blockages of the projector or of audience vision,
over the hurling of insults and food waste, or over unauthorized
audiences forcing their way in or being forced out. From live-
stock noises to children’s tantrums, from gossiping to catcalling,
from smoking to spitting, much hot noise at the cinema might be
considered “uncivilized” elements to be tamed in urban public
les espaces, but such audience noise continued to recur through the
ensuing decades.57

Besides technical interruptions and the inadequacies of
screening venues, comprehension challenges at the cinematic,
cultural, linguistic, and acoustic levels also gave rise to audience
bruit. When watching Soviet World War II films in the early
1950s, army audiences sometimes applauded at the wrong places,
such as when German troops appeared.58 Even though imported
films were dubbed into Mandarin, most rural folk understood
only local dialects. De plus, the quality of the loudspeakers and

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film prints were sometimes so poor that even projectionists had
trouble discerning the spoken dialogue.59 Last, some cinematic
langue, such as flashbacks and intercutting, baffled audiences.
To address comprehension problems, projectionists provided
introductions ahead of the screening, as well as explanations
during it, and led discussions afterward. Their live interventions
at screenings evolved into sophisticated repertoires by the 1960s,
such as using a storyteller’s bamboo clapper to perform an oral
genre (popular in North China) whose rhythmic and staccato
delivery method is reminiscent of rap. In regions populated
by ethnic minorities, projectionists did full-fledged dubbing into
local languages, even distinguishing between male and female
voices, old and young characters.60 Absorption into the film’s
diegesis, alors, depended on the extradiegetic narrations of pro-
jectionists.

Some Chinese projectionist practices recall exhibition prac-
tices of silent cinema elsewhere, including such nonfilmic activ-
ities as lectures, sound effects, and live music that “lent the show
the immediacy and singularity of a one-time performance.”61 In
Japan until the 1930s, film lecturers called benshis played mul-
tiple roles as narrator, voice actor, and audience representative,
leading communal responses to movies.62 Talkies led to the grad-
ual extinction of live narration during screenings, making the
polyphonous coexistence of film sound and voice performances
by Chinese projectionists all the more remarkable. As ventrilo-
quist voices of the state, moreover, they aimed less to entertain
than to cultivate revolutionary piety and to model correct behav-
ior.

While adapting the films’ stories and messages to the latest
political priorities, mobile projectionists also invited local cadres
and audiences to raise their voices: to shout political slogans,
sing revolutionary songs, or speak up after the screening on how
the film affected them personally. Channeling audience pande-
monium as the sound and fury of the “revolutionary masses,»
projectionists solicited, even staged, postscreening testimonies
of revolutionary faith, be they bitter memories of a prerevolution-
ary past, denunciations of local landlords or other class enemies,
or vows to contribute to a communist future.63 Projectionists
facilitated the liturgical use of revolutionary music and quasi-
congregational singing by playing LP records before the film, pro-
jecting lyrics on lantern slides, and leading audiences to sing line
by line.64 When waiting for the movie teams to arrive, schoolchild-
ren and soldiers often sang revolutionary songs to pass the time.65
Many Mao-era films embedded and repeated theme songs that
continued to reverberate through the voices of audience members.
Audience noise could thus enhance and prolong the efficacy
of film propaganda, but it could also disrupt and mock political

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communication. Consider applause, Par exemple. Former projec-
tionists recalled loud clapping at the sight of Mao or at the tri-
umphant climax of war films.66 Audiences also applauded when
the projectionist fixed a technical problem or when the copy
runner arrived with the next reel.67 Yet applause could become
booing when impatient children clapped to cut short cadre
speeches.68 Bored by repetitive and predictable films, audiences
sometimes shouted lines before they were uttered onscreen.69
Even disruptive mechanical noise could give rise to humor and
parody that subverted propaganda messages. Writer Ah Cheng
describes open-air screenings in rural Yunnan in the 1970s:

From afar drifted the faint sound of the opening film music,
the notes rising and falling. It wasn’t that easy to screen a
film in the mountains. You needed several men to take turns
powering the generator by pedaling. Sometimes the man
pedaling tired and the electricity would fluctuate, causing
the sound from the loudspeakers to become slurred, distort-
ing the well-known arias. Meanwhile on the screen, un
uplifting scene of the “heroic deeds” might have started
boldly but would suddenly lapse into hesitation. In the
mountains, though, everyone enjoyed watching anyway.
Other times the man on the pedals changed the tempo on
but, creatively improvising, and the old films would
send the audience into fits of laughter.70

If noise could become more meaningful than the film proper,
different audiences could also pick out different signals and
noises from the polyphonous sonic environment of an open-air
film screening. Whereas village children often treated cadre
speeches as boring noise to battle with their own noise-making,
the local cadres often paid for these screenings precisely for the
opportunity to address a concentrated group of villagers about
policy implementation and labor mobilization. Thus the hot
noise of rural cinema served political communication regardless
of the films’ content. Many adult villagers did listen patiently and
carefully when the cadres laid out production plans, when news-
reels showed them the latest political winds, or when “science
education films” introduced new agricultural techniques. Cependant
long-winded or monotonous, those speeches and documentaries
were more pertinent to their livelihoods than fictional features.71
The sonic environment of open-air cinema presents interest-
ing applications of and challenges to theories of film sound.
Consider, Par exemple, Michel Chion’s three listening modes.72
Audiences in China attracted to the hot noise of film screenings
practiced casual listening to identify the sound source or cause;
those actually absorbed in the film’s diegesis were semantic
listeners who decoded the film’s content; projectionists practiced

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a careful reduced listening to their machines to forestall break-
down and accidents. When I asked a former rural projectionist
what her favorite films were, she said she never paid attention to
the films because she was focused on the projector and generator.
Par contre, other projectionists were so distracted by the films
they were showing that the celluloid would snap.73 Some audi-
ences who could not afford to buy movie tickets also practiced
another form of “reduced listening” when they eavesdropped
outside cinemas or listened to a neighbor’s radio for programs
featuring sound clips from feature films.74 Rural women who
could not afford the leisure to attend even free screenings could
listen to film sound only over the loudspeakers. Because most
villagers had no access to music technologies beyond cinema,
many rural youths also went to the same movies many times
to learn the melodies and write down the lyrics for their own
singing pleasure.

To Chion’s trio of casual, semantic, and reduced listening can
be added another mode: “emplaced listening” to the soundscape
of the film screening location. Situated, live, and highly variable
from person to person, emplaced listening tied audiences to their
local environments so they could be as attentive to extrafilmic
noises as to the film’s diegetic sounds. Par exemple, open-air
moviegoers listened for distant thunder that signaled imminent
rain, while elderly villagers listened for barking dogs warning
against thieves.75 Other atmospheric noises—such as howling
wind, singing cicadas, or croaking frogs—could fall into the
background as ambient sound, but they were still “noises of the
real” that grounded audiences in the here and now. The natural
environment could further generate reactive audience noise:
buzzing mosquitos provoked smacking, heat prompted fanning,
and cold compelled the stomping of feet.

Nose and Tongue: Cinema and Commensality
What did cinema smell and taste like? Film scholars have ana-
lyzed audiovisual representations, or evocations, of smell and
taste in cinema.76 Vinzenz Hediger and Alexandra Schneider
have also discussed the public space of movie theaters as
“an instrument for public hygiene and a technology for the cre-
ation of controlled olfactory environments.”77 As they point out,
“the invention of cinema runs roughly parallel with the de-
odorization of public space and with the introduction of artificially
produced fragrances.”78 In contrast to the deodorization of urban
cinemas, open-air cinemas in rural China were heightened olfac-
tory and gustatory experiences, as the writer Ge Fei suggests in
the Proust-inspired text quoted in the second epigraph to this
article. After all, grassroots moviegoing was often accompanied
by homemade or peddler-sold snacks usually consumed only on

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Chinese New Year, as well as by feasts for the movie team, village
cadres, and nearby relatives. De plus, the coming of the movies
occasioned gatherings of bodies that emanated scents, sweat,
smoke, and other odors in open-air environments, also perfumed
by fragrant plants and fetid manure.79

Smoke, not only a nuisance to the nose, could also blur the
vision.80 Yet in open-air cinema, fire and smoke could provide
light, warmth, sustenance, and protection: a lantern or torch
could illuminate the way home; portable bamboo hand warmers
burning charcoal helped many withstand the winter cold; quelques
learned to smoke to drive away the myriad of mosquitos drawn
to the cinema’s light; some made bonfires to roast corn or sweet
potatoes.81 Smoking was also part of local leisure and consump-
tion. According to a Beijinger sent to rural Shanxi during the
Cultural Revolution, cigarette vendors at open-air screenings
bought cigarettes at fourteen cents a pack and sold individual
cigarettes at three cents each. Teased for her “snowballing
usury,” the vendor “radiated a smile and said: ‘Not expensive at
tous. For three cents you get to enjoy the life of a city person.’”82
The smell and taste of smoke thus added to the alchemy of fantasy
created by the audiovisual images.

The synesthetic delights of open-air cinema are reflected in
one projectionist’s 1959 poem on open-air cinema in rural Hubei
Province:

People gather at the square, lights shine, songs ripple,
Men and women are merry, old and young are jubilant
Onscreen, tractors roll, bountiful ears of grain curl
Red apples, yellow pears, bunch after bunch of grapes

make children salivate . . .

The brigade leader says: watching movies made us work

harder,

That’s how we filled up our boats with fish.83

In both contemporary and retrospective writings, cinema in the
Mao era was dubbed “spiritual food” that motivated food pro-
duction and/or compensated for food scarcity.84 Projected images
of plenty were intended to inspire audiences to work hard at
turning utopian visions into reality. Yet even this propaganda
poem suggests a tension between abundance and scarcity, aspi-
ration and reality, production and consumption, as the food
onscreen only pinpoints its lack offscreen. If we read this poem
with retrospective knowledge of the Great Leap famine that
killed tens of millions, we can see the delectable fruits as a mirage
and taste the saliva as the gastric acid of hunger. What we have
ici, alors, is phantom commensality.

In classical sociological theories of commensality, “sharing
food is a way of establishing closeness, alors que, inversement, le

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refusal to share is one of the clearest marks of distance and
enmity.”85 The public mess halls of China’s Great Leap Forward,
cependant, instituted what James Watson calls “coercive commen-
sality” to mobilize women’s labor from domestic chores as well
as “imagined commensality” that fed on utopian fantasies.86 The
collective canteens collapsed a few months after their institution,
but cinema as a form of phantom, illusory, or spiritual commen-
sality continued in the absence of food.

The paradoxical role of food in socialist cinema deserves its
own study. Suffice it to say here that the bounty and scarcity of
food onscreen projected future utopias and recalled past sacri-
fices to contextualize the present in gustatory metaphors: past
bitterness gave rise to present sweetness, and present bitterness
would give rise to future sweetness. Entre-temps, lavish feasts and
gluttony were negatively coded as the rapacious sin of Japanese
invaders, Kuomintang officials, landlords, capitalists, and ban-
dits.87 And yet, many audiences living amid socialist austerity
could not help but vicariously “consume” the onscreen food
meant to inspire productive labor, even secretly identifying with
the “bad guys.”88 Even in the 1970s, audiences salivated after
foods in newsreels featuring diplomatic feasts, “science educa-
tion films” teaching agricultural techniques, or the North Korean
film When We Pick Apples, on making applesauce out of the
harvest surplus.89

Beyond “feasting” their eyes, audiences also literally ate at the
cinema. To get to the screening on time, many would hurry
through schoolwork, farmwork, or domestic chores and eat early
or skip supper altogether, instead bringing or buying food, lequel
often meant not staples but snacks such as roasted peanuts, soy-
beans, or sunflower seeds, sweet potato chips, tea eggs, sugar
cane, candied hawthorns, and red bean popsicles.90 Homemade
snacks required ingredients, temps, and labor, so anticipation
of the film was folded into the very production of the food.
Prepared in haste, some snacks might still taste raw, mais ça, aussi,
was savored as cinema’s delight. From the 1970s onward, a grow-
ing peddler economy added steaming aromas and hawking cries
to screenings. Snacks could be shared as tokens of sentiment,
friendship, and infatuation—or rouse envy and aggression.91 A
memoir of rural Shanxi in North China describes how the open-
air film screen would be encircled by the dim lamps of peddlers
with baskets or carts selling roasted sunflower seeds, five-spice
roasted peanuts, dried tofu, even lamb kebab, liquor, and home-
made cigars. While onscreen newsreels showed laboring or
fist-raising masses shouting anticapitalist slogans, offscreen
“capitalist tails” continued to peddle their wares to eager con-
sumers, sometimes beneath banners stating “Learn from Dazhai,»
the model communist village of the 1960s and 1970s.92

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Besides eating snacks at the screening, village cadres often
invited the movie team to meals before or after the film.
Projectionist reports and memoirs often mention the touching
hospitality of the rural folk alongside comical anecdotes about
naive villagers mistaking onscreen characters for live actors or
cooking enough food to feed a large theater troupe.93 Other
stories, cependant, highlight abject poverty. A former projectionist
I interviewed recalled a meal from the mid-1950s at the home of
the party secretary, “the richest man in the village,” who gener-
ously offered the movie team cured meat that his family had
parsimoniously saved for two weeks since the Chinese New Year,
not knowing that it was already rancid.94 Although movie teams
paid for their meals with cash and ration coupons, some cadres
also drew on the collective budget to pay for the feasts and the
movie fee, begrudging villagers who considered the practice cor-
rupt or unfair.95 Feasting the movie team also gave local cadres
an excuse to drink, which in turn led to inebriated, long-winded
speeches.96 Beyond the movie team, local villagers had to feed
relatives and friends who came for the screenings. Ainsi, many
village women rarely had time to watch the movies because they
were busy cooking for guests.97

Hands and Feet: Touching Hot Noise
In The Skin of Film, Laura Marks writes about how grainy, densely
textured, and sensuous images taken by cameras close to the
body evoke “haptic visuality” so that “the eyes themselves func-
tion like organs of touch.”98 In her phenomenology of film,
Vivian Sobchack traces theoretical antecedents for the “carnal
sensuality of the film experience”: “Our fingers, our skin and
nose and lips and tongue and stomach and all the other parts of
us understand what we see.”99 More than just a place where
images evoke the sense of touch through synesthesia, cependant,
the cinema is a space of literal acts of touching, such as the
“magic touch” of the projectionist, the footsteps that carried
audience members to and from the screening, and the clash of
bodies as audience members stood or sat during the film.

The touch of the projectionist’s hands brought films to life,
repaired old machines, and spliced together broken celluloid.
Before showing a film, the projectionists hands might also play
bamboo clappers and show lantern slides dubbed “rustic film.”100
Cheap to purchase and easy to produce, lantern slides could be
projected using gas lamps without bulky generators in areas
without electricity. While some slides were mass-produced,
many projectionists made their own by first interviewing local
heroes, gathering local histories, and then writing a script and
painting a slideshow.101 Some even “animated” their slideshows
using a three- or four-lens projector so audiences could see red

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flags waving, horses running, people walking, and birds flying
and landing on plum blossoms.102 Just as their productions
depended on handicraft, the temporality of the slideshows
depended on the hand that pulled the slides and on the commen-
tary that accompanied the show—what Tom Lamarre calls a
“time of gesture and speech” that endows every magic lantern
show with a performative quality not found in ordinary film pro-
jection.103 At its best, the cooperation among members of the
movie team resembled the virtuosity of a chamber music trio.

Some uses of the projectionists’ hands were clumsier and
naughtier. Par exemple, although they might be told to censor
erotically charged scenes, such as a ballet and a kiss in the film
Lenin in 1918, by putting their hands in front of the lens of
the projector, their attempts at digital censorship could have the
opposite effect of enhancing a tantalizing eroticism. Some pro-
jectionists would even open their fingers a crack to give audi-
ences a glimpse of the forbidden images.104 In county seats or
townships, audiences who had seen Lenin in 1918 multiple
times often left the film in droves after the Swan Lake scene, their
flapping seats making quite a racket.

Many reminiscences of rural moviegoing begin with the jour-
ney to the cinema. For some, the going was more memorable than
the film, their feet bearing the corporeal brunt of the adventure.
Some villagers without adequate shoes walked barefoot along
kilometers of mountainous paths, making this an era not only of
“barefoot projectionists” (as commune movie teams were
dubbed) but “barefoot audiences.” Some villagers in Ningxia in
Northwest China recalled having to wade through streams in a
mountain valley, making it necessary to take off their shoes and
roll up their pants. Because many screenings were held during
winter months (typically a time of leisure from farm work), le
streams would be frozen, but it was still easy to break the ice and
splash water on one’s pants and shoes, which were made of worn
cotton or straw because most villagers could not afford rubber
boots. The wet pants and shoes in turn froze as temperatures
dropped during the screening, “but our hearts were hot and we
might just take off our wet shoes and jump up and down to get
warm.”105 This added a special sound effect to the hot noise of
cinema: the thunderous sound of stomping feet.

In contrast to the soft sofas of today’s multiplex cinemas where
we might forget our bodies, open-air cinema often stimulated an
intense awareness of one’s body between the sky and earth, vul-
nerable to wind, rain, snow, mosquitoes, heat, and cold. Bug bites
and frostbite, scratches and rashes all became corporeal souvenirs
of moviegoing.106 When Siberian winds brought the temperature
to minus thirty degrees Celsius, according to a memoir by a
former sent-down youth in Xinjiang, open-air film audiences

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had frost on our lashes, fog coming out of our breath, et
icicles growing from our nose and lips. We all folded our
arms inside opposite sleeves or rubbed our faces and noses.
Celluloid became even more brittle in the cold, so when the
projectionist spliced broken celluloid together, everyone
returned to their dorms to warm up before coming back out-
side to finish the film.107

In answer to my questionnaire, another former sent-down youth
recalled an open-air screening in a school drilling ground in
Inner Mongolia in 1974:

Each of us sat on a brick or stone found on the spot. After
the first reel, we had to wait in the cold night for the copy
runner to bring a second reel. The cold air seeped into my
military coat and cotton shoes. My face, hands, and feet
became numb. We rubbed our hands and faces and jumped
up and down. Even though nobody forced us to stay, hardly
anyone left. We could no longer distinguish between enjoy-
ment and torment, or judge whether the film being
screened was even worth such endurance. The loudspeaker
kept reporting how close the copy runner was, but the sec-
ond reel still hadn’t arrived. When it finally came and was
screened, we had to wait for the third reel and so on and so
forth. I’ve forgotten if we eventually finished the movie. je
can only remember the growing pain, fatigue, and the numb
stupidity of not leaving. I returned to the dorm at dawn and
went to work in the fields the next morning, but by the end
of the day I began to urinate blood and was diagnosed with
severe nephritis.108

Open-air screening locations not only had no roofs but no seats.
Every shred of bodily comfort depended on makeshift bricolage
and personal resourcefulness. Local villagers brought benches
from schools, stools from home, and stones from the rivers.
Audiences who arrived later and from farther away climbed on
trees, walls, roofs, haystacks, bicycles, and shoulders.109 Most
simply stood, some on their tiptoes. A former sent-down youth
recalled, “You needed a strong body to go to the cinema in the
countryside, because the crowd sometimes left you nowhere to
stand. The elderly who got tired and took a break often lost their
spot when they came back.”110

Where one sat or stood at a screening could also indicate the
social and political mapping of a community, its hierarchies and
réseaux, its centers and margins, inclusions and exclusions.
The village leader usually sat next to the projectionist and could
decide when the film was to begin. Young people came early to
occupy the best spots for their friends and relatives. While wait-
ing for the film to start, audiences would chat, snack, knit, play

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cards, or get into scuffles.111 Some went to open-air cinema as a
famille, with children sitting in their grandparents’ laps or riding
on their fathers’ shoulders, but most socialized with members of
the same generation.112 Although the “social horizon of recep-
tion” was also prevalent in early American cinemagoing, it per-
sisted in Chinese open-air cinema throughout the socialist era.113
As the only nightlife available to Chinese villagers without elec-
tricity, open-air cinema broke down everyday rules and separa-
tion. Adolescents fraternized and flirted. The shadows of lovers
could be spotted farther from the screen, while some pairs disap-
peared from view altogether.114 Cinema thus provided a camou-
flage for couples who otherwise might find no occasion to touch,
talk, or even look at each other under the moral surveillance
of other villagers. Many later cited open-air cinema as their
matchmaker.115

Yet open-air cinema was not just a milieu for bodily intimacy;
occasionally, it was the scene of bodily clashes. Flirting could
turn into blatant sexual harassment that provoked scuffles, souvent
between young men of different villages, for whom moviegoing
served to release pent-up energy.116 In roofless but enclosed
spaces such as the courtyards of schools, barracks, or shrines,
crowd management was a perennial issue. Grassroots audiences
often practiced “guerrilla tactics”: “sneaking in” when movie
teams sold tickets or otherwise limited admission.117 The bound-
aries of makeshift film screening locations were often porous to
unauthorized audiences, who tried to enter by climbing through
windows, picking up discarded tickets, or arriving early and hid-
ing until dark. According to a 1963 report, a movie team in
Hunan tried charging admission at a screening inside the court-
yard of a big ancestral shrine. Local cadres assisted with tickets
and maintained security, but they managed to sell only two
hundred tickets while the actual number of audience numbers
climbed to one thousand—most of whom entered by scaling the
walls or rumbling in through the door, in the process wounding
and tearing the clothes of the commune’s party secretary, OMS
was guarding the entrance. The stampede also wounded several
enfants, destroyed the ancestral shrine’s roof tiles, and damaged
the door and many tables and chairs.118 Film gazetteers also doc-
ument fatal accidents: walls crashing down on audiences or
moviegoers falling into rivers.119 Such accounts suggest that,
even at the height of Maoism, the “revolutionary masses” that
films and projectionists tried so hard to discipline could trans-
form at any point into an unruly mob.

Epilogue
In the postsocialist era, the hot noise of open-air cinema has
cooled and abated, faded and drifted to the margins of the Chinese

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sensorium. Grassroots film exhibition, which saw its golden age
in the early 1980s, met its demise in the 1990s with the rise of
television and VHS, followed by pirated VCDs, DVDs, Internet,
and smartphones. The changing media ecology coincided with
mass migration of the rural labor force to the cities and the grow-
ing desolation of the countryside. Many projectionists took up
other jobs, with only a minority still making ends meet in the
1990s and early 2000s by showing movies in schools and at
private celebrations still in need of hot noise. Ainsi, instead of
supporting communist cadres convening political meetings,
movie teams lent their lights, microphones, loudspeakers, et
bodily performances to birthdays, weddings, funerals, and adver-
tisements for local companies.120

The hot noise of cinema has died down because it has been
overwhelmed by other noises in the sensorium, with more
screens and loudspeakers than ever featuring ever-flashier sights
and ever-louder sounds. In the late 1990s, the Chinese Ministry
of Culture tried to revive rural mobile cinema with the “2131
Project”—aimed at achieving “one movie per month per village”
in the early twenty-first century. During fieldwork in Hubei and
Zhejiang Provinces from 2015 à 2019, my research assistants
and I followed various mobile projectionists to open-air film
screenings with high-definition digital projectors on minivans or
pickup trucks. Most such screenings attracted only a handful of
villagers, who stayed for about half an hour before heading home
to their TV sets, while the projectionist looked at his cell phone.
Sometimes a projectionist lost his audience completely to drizzle
or a nearby “square dance” with booming loudspeakers. Toujours, il
would finish showing the film to nobody—or, rather, to the GPS
surveillance chip built into the projector so that he would be
paid later.

The hottest and noisiest screenings I attended were held by
a “model projectionist” in rural Wenzhou in the courtyards of
various ancestral shrines, some of which have been renovated as
“cultural ritual halls” (wenhua litang). One guardian of a “cultural
ritual hall” told me that film screenings and other communal
activities were crucial for the government’s spiritual competition
with local Christian churches. At these well-attended screenings,
cependant, mahjong and other forms of gambling were often of
greater interest than the films. In rural Hebei, not too far from
Beijing, by contrast, I waited around for days for an open-air
screening that never took place because “the wind is too great,»
or “there will be a sandstorm,” or “the air quality is bad.” I never
saw the moon or the stars in open-air screenings, which took
place not in fresh air but in air rendered toxic by the smog of the
nearby factories banished from the big cities. Air pollution, light
pollution, noise pollution, as well as mass deracination through

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demolition and migration, assail the sensorium of today’s grass-
roots China. Sensory overstimulation can lead to shock and
numbness, so open-air cinema has become dull and muffled,
invisible and inaudible against audiovisual saturation, just as
satiated bellies blunted the flavors of traditional snacks. Sensory
overload can go some way to explain the paradoxical nostalgia
for the sensory austerity under socialism, nostalgia that gave rise
to most of the sources for this essay.

What, alors, was cinema in socialist China? The village elders
I interviewed were probably right: cinema was not so much the
films shown as the hot noise of extrafilmic sights, sounds, les odeurs,
taste, and touch. Emanating from the apparatus, the audience, ou
the atmosphere, hot noise included heat and cold, wind and rain,
moon and mosquitos, snacks and feasts, shoes and roads, main
shadows and stomping feet, screens and seating, power genera-
tors and loudspeakers. Cinema as hot noise was a participatory
and heightened sensory experience for grassroots audiences. Comme
special occasions for mass congregation, carnival, and consump-
tion against a backdrop of sensory deprivation, open-air cinema
brought together bodies that moved and acted, sensed and
reacted; bodies that emanated and absorbed sights, sounds, et
les odeurs; bodies that touched and were touched. Instead of being
soldered into the “revolutionary masses” by cinema’s electrifying
hot noise, cependant, the extrafilmic visual, aural, olfactory, gusta-
tory, and haptic noises at open-air screenings often dwarfed and
drowned out the films’ propaganda messages. If socialist cin-
ema’s open-air screen was intended as a flag, a sail, and a light-
maison, its utopian visions arrived at the grass roots as mirages and
phantoms that paled against the noises of a lived reality. Donc
cinema in socialist China was a “physical medium” whose phys-
icality consisted of both the corporeality of bodily senses and the
materiality of the technological infrastructure that undergirds
cinema’s seemingly immaterial images and sounds. Only by lis-
tening for such extrafilmic hot noise can we discern the diverse
and visceral cinematic experiences of grassroots audiences.

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Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

27

Remarques
1. Tan Hanxin, “Lutian dianying” [Open-air cinema], in Yiwang qingshen [Deep
feelings] (Dongguan: Dongguan Cultural Center, 2009), 247. This memoir dis-
cusses open-air cinema in Tan’s hometown in rural Guangdong in the 1970s.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Chinese are my own.

2. Ge Fei, “Xiangcun dianying” [Village cinema], in Yigeren de dianying [Un
individual’s cinema] (Beijing: Zhongxin chubanshe, 2008), 1–2. This reminis-
cence refers to open-air cinema in rural Jiangsu in the 1970s.

3. Yunnan sheng dianying faxing fangying gongzuo jinian tekan
[Commemorative publication on film distribution and exhibition work in
Yunnan Province] (internal publication, 1984), 2.

4. Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,»
in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Lévine
(Cambridge: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 1995), 323–28; and Walter Benjamin,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Londres: Penguin UK,
2008). Also see Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical
Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing Film Studies, éd. Christine
Gledhill and Linda Williams (Londres: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 2000), 332–50.
5. Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema,

1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–5.

6. Zhang, 4; and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New
Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Presse universitaire de Harvard,
1999), 82.

7. Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in

Chine, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

8. “Guanyu kaizhan chunjie nongcun wenyi huodong xiang nongmin
xuanchuan zongluxian de zhishi” [Directives on propagating the General Line
to peasants through the arts during Spring Festival], Dianying fangying ziliao
[Film projection materials], Février 1954, 2–3.

9. For an overview of film production and distribution in the Mao era,
see Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (New York:
la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge, 1987); and Zhuoyi Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in
Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

10. Jie Li, “Gained in Translation: The Reception of Foreign Cinema in Mao’s

Chine,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, Non. 1 (2019): 61–75.

11. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment
and the Senses (Durham, Caroline du Nord: Duke University Press, 1999); and Vivian Sobchack,
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Presse de l'Université de Californie, 2004), 54–56, 84. Also see Emma Widdis,
Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (Bloomington:
Presse universitaire de l'Indiana, 2017).

12. Ina Rae Hark, éd., Exhibition, the Film Reader (New York: Routledge,
2002); and Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, éd., Going to
the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter, ROYAUME-UNI:
University of Exeter Press, 2007).

13. From the 1950s to the 1960s, projectionists across China contributed
reports about screening practices and audience responses to magazines. In the
1980s and 1990s, provincial film histories included reminiscences by former
projectionists. Memoirs and autobiographical fiction by the generation born in
the 1950s and 1960s also give nostalgic accounts and rich descriptions of
moviegoing in the Cultural Revolution decade. For an early cinema history
from below in Great Britain and for the term memory text, see Annette Kuhn,
An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (Londres: IB Tauris, 2002),

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6–11. Kuhn also coedited a special issue of Memory Studies on cinemagoing
that calls for more comparative inquiry given the “relative underdevelopment
of cinema memory research outside of Europe, the US, Australia.” See Annette
Kuhn, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, “Memories of Cinemagoing and
Film Experience: An Introduction,” Memory Studies 10, Non. 1 (2017): 11.

14. My early interviewees were found among my parent’s network of friends
from Shanghai and Beijing who were sent to different parts of the country
during the Cultural Revolution, especially Northeast China but also Inner
Mongolia. Depuis 2015 à 2019, I took five field trips to Zhejiang, Hubei, Hebei,
and Northeastern Provinces in collaboration with history professor Feng
Xiaocai and/or his graduate students from East China Normal University, OMS
were conducting local archival research and villager interviews for other pro-
jects on Chinese economic, sociale, cultural, and religious histories. Drawing on
their local contacts, graduate student research assistants (RAs) helped me find
grassroots projectionists and audiences, translate between Mandarin and local
dialects, and take notes at interviews. A few RAs also conducted interviews on
my behalf using a questionnaire I had prepared in advance. An average inter-
view lasted about half an hour, but we also held many casual conversations and
several extended oral histories that totaled three to four hours each. Three grad-
uate student RAs in particular—Li Bingbing, Lyu Hongyun, and Wang Sisi—
asked questions about moviegoing on my behalf when conducting interviews
for their own M.A. or Ph.D. research on opera troupes, electricity usage, et
Buddhist practice. Using a similar set of questions about memories of open-air
cinema, my Harvard Ph.D. advisee Hai Peng conducted and transcribed inter-
views with fifteen rural villagers in Ningxia in Northwest China. I extend spe-
cial thanks to all the RAs and interviewees for enriching the sources of this
étude.

15. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban
Modernité (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Presse de l'Université de Californie, 2005),
95–97.

16. Stewart, 97. My methodology is also indebted to Yuri Tsivian’s notion of
“cultural reception,” consisting of “active, creative, interventionist, or even
aggressive” responses to cinema. See Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and
Its Cultural Reception (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.

17. For studies of itinerant film exhibition in the early twentieth century, voir
Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe
and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2015); Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema
and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge: Presse universitaire de Harvard,
2014), chs. 1–2; and Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many
Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), ch. 2.

18. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Médias, Infrastructure and Urban Culture

in Nigeria (Durham, Caroline du Nord: Duke University Press, 2008), 13, 153.

19. Amit Rai, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media

Assemblage (Durham, Caroline du Nord: Duke University Press, 2009), 9, 54.

20. Lakshmi Srinivas, House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3.

21. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s

Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 6.

22. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester, ROYAUME-UNI:
Manchester University Press, 1985), 27; Adam Yuet Chau, “The Sensorial
Production of the Social,” Ethnos 73, Non. 4 (2008): 485–504; and Shuenn-Der
Yu, “Hot and Noisy,” in The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in

Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

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Taiwan, éd. David Jordan, Andrew Morris, and Marc Moskowitz (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 138–39.

23. Robert Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taipei Rebels,
Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1994), 118.

24. Yu, 138–40.
25. Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation
of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Presse californienne, 2007), 72.

26. Goldstein, 72.
27. Liu Guangyu, Xin Zhongguo chengli yilai nongcun dianying fangying
yanjiu [Study of rural film exhibition since the founding of New China]
(Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2015), 222–23.

28. Celebrating the carnival as unofficial culture that inverts elite values and
hence offers an emancipatory space to the lower classes, Mikhail Bakhtin gave
special attention to the soundscape of the medieval city, its music, bells,
shouts, curses, and bodily sounds, asserting that “the culture of the common
folk idiom was to a great extent a culture of the loud word spoken in the open,
in the street and marketplace.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,
trans. Helene Iswolsky, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Presse universitaire de l'Indiana, 1968),
182. The Chinese phrase “gathering hot noise” also resonates with Amit Rai’s
study of “loitering” in Bollywood cinemagoing as “a historically nonlinear
movement of bodies in bazaar culture” that adds “density to the scene of [film]
exhibition.” See Rai, 38. Hot noise is also akin to what Brian Larkin calls an
“excess of affect,” whereby moviegoing “is a visceral event, often charged with
feelings of danger, illicitness, eroticism, and excitement.” Larkin, 149, 153.

29. Zhang Ning, Tudi de huanghun: Zhongguo xiangcun jingyan de weiguan
quanli fenxi [Land at dusk: A micropolitical analysis of Chinese village expe-
riences] (Shanghai: Dongfang chubanshe, 2005), 53.

30. Zhiwei Xiao, “Movie House Etiquette Reform in Early Twentieth-Century

Chine,” Modern China 32, Non. 4 (2006): 514.

31. William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, et
the Evolution of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
32. Sun Jianwei, Heilongjiang dianying bainian [A hundred years of cinema
in Heilongjiang Province] (Harbin: Heilongjiang University Press, 2012), 55;
and Jiang Zequan, Dianyingyuan jianzhu [Cinema architecture] (Beijing:
Zhongguo gongye chubanshe, 1964), 2–4, 85–148.

33. Dianyingyuan sheji [Cinema design] (Nanjing: Nanjing Institute of

Technology Pedagogy and Research Group, 1963), 36, 72.

34. Dianyingyuan sheji, 33, 36–38.
35. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of

Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 34.

36. Tom Gunning, “A Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, éd. Wanda Strauven
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 383.

37. Yunnan Sheng dianying faxing fangying gongzuo jinian tekan, 14, 121–
22; Guangxi Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, Guangxi dianying fax-
ing fangying shi [History of film distribution and exhibition in Guangxi]
(Guilin: Guangxi Film Company, 1995), 26–27; Li Gexin, Jiangshu Qingdao de
gushi [Telling Qingdao’s story] (Jinan: Shandong sheng ditu chubanshe, 2013),
90; and Yu Dongxing, Ma la huoche de defang [A place of horse-drawn locomo-
tives], http://qiancenglang.com/NewsTitle.aspx?ID=1942. The last item is a
memoir about growing up in rural Henan.

30 Grey Room 81

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38. Ge Fei, 2. Hai Peng, interview with Teacher Li (b. 1959) in Ningxia, Avril

2017.

39. Guangxi Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, 51.
40. Lu Chun, “Zuo yige mingfu qishi de wenhua zhanxian shang de jian-
bing” [Be a veritable vanguard on the cultural front], Dianying fangying [Film
projection], Non. 4 (1957): 16–19; and “Ba dianying song dao nongcun li qu”
[Send movies into the countryside], Dazhong dianying [Mass cinema], Non. 5
(1952): 28.

41. Mu Xiaoli, Yigeren de xingzou [One person’s journey] (Ningbo: Ningbo
chubanshe, 2011), 146–47; and Wang Xinpeng, Women xin sanjie [We three
new classes] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2008), 145. Mu’s account is based on
her childhood memories from rural Henan in the 1970s and 1980s, alors que
Wang writes about open-air cinema in both his Anhui hometown as well as
rural Jiangsu, where he was sent down during the Cultural Revolution.

42. Qinghai dianying zhi [Qinghai film gazetteer] (Xining: Qinghai sheng

wenhua ting, 1989), 194–95.

43. Guo Wenlian, Yili Wangshi [Memories of Ili] (Hefei: Anhui wenyi
chubanshe, 2013), 117. This memoir is of Guo’s experiences as a sent-down
youth in Xinjiang in the 1970s.

44. Fan Xiufeng, Cun shang de shi [Village matters] (Shijiazhuang: Huashan
wenyi chubanshe, 2010), 264 (memories of rural Hebei); Yu Liang, Naxie nian
naxie shi: Yige nongmin de jiyi [Those years: A peasant’s memories] (Beijing:
Haichao chubanshe, 2014), 29 (memories of Beijing suburbs); and Lian Xiaohua,
Ge’ermu de tiankong [The sky of Golmud] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban-
elle, 2005), 157 (memories of the steppes of Qinghai).

45. Wang Anyi, “Wenge yishi” [A tale from the Cultural Revolution], dans
Zhongguo dangdai wenxue jingdian bidu [Chinese contemporary literary clas-
sics], éd. Wu Yiqin (Nanchang: Baihua zhou wenyi, 2016), 136–37. This fic-
tional account is based on Wang Anyi’s experiences as a sent-down youth in
rural Anhui in the 1970s.

46. Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art

and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 6.

47. Elcott.
48. Zhuang Zhijuan, “Sanci teshu de kan dianying jingli” [Three special

film-viewing experiences], Shiji, Non. 2 (2012): 44–45.

49. For memories of open-air cinema from Shaanxi and Gansu, both in
Northwest China, see Qi Yujiang, Hongdu qingshen [Deep sentiments for the
red capital] (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 2011), 117; and Bei Yan, Shan
de nayibian [The other side of the mountain] (Guangzhou: Jinan University
Presse, 2012), 102. For reminiscences of a sent-down youth in Xinjiang in the
1970s, see Yao Juntao, éd., Yilingba tuan zhi [108th Regiment gazetteer]
(Xinjiang: Xinjiang dianzi gongye chubanshe, 2005), 378.

50. For reminiscences of open-air cinema from rural Wenzhou, see Tang
Hongxiang, Lengnuan rensheng [Life’s vicissitudes] (Beijing: Zhongguo minzu
shying yishu chubanshe, 2005), 10.

51. Hai Peng, interviews with female villagers born in the 1950s in Ningxia,

Avril 2017.

52. Qinghai dianying zhi, 194–95.
53. This was the consensus of former projectionists and audiences I inter-

viewed from 2012 à 2019.
54. Larkin, 218–19.
55. The phrase is quoted in Larkin but is originally from Friedrich Kittler,
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Californie: Stanford University Press, 1999),

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14.

56. Yu Liang, 219. Yu’s memories are of a rural village near Beijing in the
1960s and 1970s. For a similar account from rural Anhui, see Wang Xinpeng,
149.

57. Xiao, 516–27; and Liu Yingying, “Tiantang dianyingyuan” [Cinema

Paradiso], Baihuazhou, Non. 3 (2010), 131.

58. “Nongcun fangying xuanchuan gongzuo jingyan jieshao” [Introducing
experiences of rural film propaganda work], Dazhong dianying [Mass cinema],
Non. 17 (1954): 33.

59. Author interview with former projectionist Zheng Yaoyu in Zhejiang,

Juin 2019. Also see a reminiscence from Gansu in Bei Yan, 102.

60. Chen Qie, “Bozhong, kaihua, jieguo—Ji Yanbian yong chaoyu jieshuo
yingpian de jingyan jiqi tuiguang” [Sowing seeds, blooming flowers, bearing
fruits: How Yanbian projectionists used Korean to explain films], Dianying
yishu [Film art], Non. 1 (1964): 27–30.

61. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent
Film (Cambridge: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 1994), 93–94. Also see Richard
Abel and Rick Altman, éd., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington:
Presse universitaire de l'Indiana, 2001).

62. Hideaki Fujiki, “Benshi as Stars: The Irony of the Popularity and
Respectability of Voice Performers in Japanese Cinema,” Cinema Journal 45,
Non. 2 (2006): 68–84. In Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, local benshis
served as translators for their audiences and inserted subversive comments into
their narrations. See Kuei-Fen Chiu, “The Question of Translation in Taiwanese
Colonial Cinematic Space,” Journal of Asian Studies 70, Non. 1 (2011): 77–97.

63. “Pinxiazhongnong kan dianying” [Poor and lower-middle peasants

watch films], Dazhong dianying [Mass cinema], Non. 2–3 (1965): 47.

64. Author interviews with former projectionists in rural Hubei and

Zhejiang, 2015 et 2017.

65. Sun Jian, Chun zai wuren chu [Spring is where nobody is] (Nanjing:
Jiangsu University Press, 2014), 184 (reminiscence of open-air cinema in rural
Jiangsu).

66. See reminiscences of open-air screenings in rural Henan, Shandong, et
Ningxia Provinces from the 1960s and 1970s: Mu Xiaoli, 146–47; Li Yanlin,
Chuntian zhu zai wo de cunzhuang [Spring lives in my village] (Jinan:
Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), 58; and Hai Peng, interviews with villagers
in Ningxia, Avril 2017.

67. See reminiscences of open-air cinema in the 1960s and 1970s from rural
Shaanxi and Jiangsu: Chen Jiarui, Ren zai Chang’an diji qiao [On which bridge
of Chang’an] (Xi’an: Xi’an chubanshe, 2010), 270; and Ge Fei, “Xiangcun diany-
ing,» 12.

68. Li Yanlin, 56–57 (account from Shandong); and Qi Yujiang, 116 (account

from Shaanxi).

69. Based on childhood memories of growing up in a Beijing military com-
pound, Jiang Wen’s 1994 film In the Heat of the Sun features an open-air
screening of Lenin in 1918 at which audiences off-screen shout in unison,
“Careful, it’s poison,” before the camera tilts up to the screen, where a villain
utters the same line, provoking roaring laughter from the crowd.

70. Ah Cheng, “The King of Children,” in The King of Trees: Three Stories
by Ah Cheng, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (New York: New Directions, 2010),
173. First published in 1984, this novella is based on Ah Cheng’s experiences
as a sent-down urban youth in rural Yunnan in the 1970s.

71. Li Jiantong, Na nian na ye [Those years, those nights] (Shijiazhuang:

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Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 2013), 33 (account from rural Shandong); and Xia
Lei, Qiu yi wei qi [Due in autumn] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2009),
159 (account from rural Jiangsu).

72. Michel Chion, “The Three Listening Modes,” in Audio-Vision, trans.

C. Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25–34.

73. Author interview with a former projectionist in Wenzhou, Juillet 2017.
74. Dong Zhi, “Lao dianyingyuan” [Old cinema], Junma, Non. 3 (2012): 53–
57. This account is from Hailar, in Inner Mongolia. Also see Nicole Huang,
“Listening to Films: Politics of the Auditory in 1970s China,” Journal of Chinese
Cinemas 7, Non. 3 (2013): 187–206.

75. Hai Peng, interview with Villager Mu (b. 1949) in Ningxia, Avril 2017.
76. Marks, 144, 204–5; and Hajnal Király, “The Alienated Body: Smell,
Touch and Oculocentrism in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema,” in The Cinema
of Sensations, éd. Ágnes Peth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Édition, 2015), 185–208.

77. Vinzenz Hediger and Alexandra Schneider, “The Deferral of Smell:
Cinema, Modernity and the Reconfiguration of the Olfactory Experience,” in
I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema, éd. Alice Autelitano,
Veronica Innocenti, and Valentina Re (Udine: Forum, 2005), 243–52.

78. Hediger and Schneider, 244.
79. These details are drawn from the following memoirs of growing up in
rural Jiangsu and Hainan Island: Li Xiaojun, Hou geming niandai de tongnian
[Postrevolutionary childhood] (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe,
2015) (memoirs of rural Jiangsu in the 1980s); and Luo Haibo, Yongyuan de
xiangshou [Forever together] (Hainan: Hainan chubanshe, 2007), 157–58.

80. Xiao, 521; and Li Aidong, éd., Dianying: Women gongtong de jiyi
[Cinema: Our common memory] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe,
2007), 3: 103–4.

81. See cinemagoing accounts from Hunan and Gansu: Liu Dacheng, Xiangxi
tongnian [West Hunan childhood] (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2016), 126–
28; and Qi Yujiang, 116.

82. Cui Jizhe, Zuihou de lang [The last wolf] (Taiyuan: Sanjin chubanshe,

2014), 98.

83. Zhang Daquan, “Diyici zai shuixiang fangying” [Showing film in a water

town], Dianying fangying [Film projection], Non. 11 (1959): 21–22.

84. Qi Yujiang, 116 (account from rural Gansu).
85. Maurice Bloch, “Commensality and Poisoning,” Social Research 66,

Non. 1 (Spring 1999): 133–49.

86. James L. Watson, “Feeding the Revolution: Public Mess Halls and
Coercive Commensality in Maoist China,” in Governance of Life in Chinese
Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life, éd. Everett Zhang, Arthur
Kleinman, and Tu Weiming (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33–46.

87. See scenes of feasting, Par exemple, in Xie Jin’s 1961 Red Detachment of

Women.

88. A former moviegoer in Guiyang in Southwest China recalls identifying
with the chubby sailor on a balcony box seat who gnawed on a chicken leg, star-
ing at and leaning toward the “little swans” on stage in Lenin in 1918. See Wang
Erliu, “Hebin dianyingyuan” [Hebin cinema], Guiyang wenshi [Guiyang liter-
ature and history], Non. 1 (2012): 18–19.

89. See accounts of moviegoing from Liaoning, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu in the
1970s: Li Aidong, 1: 214, 4: 8–9; Mu Xiaoli, 146–47; and He’ergou, “Zuori zhi ri
buke zhui, chuntian niannian dao renjian” [We cannot catch yesterday, printemps
comes every year], [blog], Février 26, 2016, https://read01.com/NoADQa.html.

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90. These memories of eating at open-air film showings are drawn from rem-
iniscences of moviegoing in Northeast, Northwest, and East China, y compris
Li Aidong, 4: 136; Lian Xiaohua, 157–58; and Shi Sanfu, Qiao shui lazhu qu
[Knocking water candles] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 91.
91. For an account of sharing snacks at the movies in rural Ningbo, see Zhou
Jianqiang, Wo ge Jiangbei [I sing of Jiangbei] (Ningbo: Ningbo chubanshe, 2016),
165.

92. Cui Jizhe, 98 (account from rural Shanxi in the 1970s).
93. Li Yanlin, 58 (account from rural Shandong); and Yu Dongxing, esp. ch.

“Xiangcun dianying” [Village cinema] (account from rural Henan).

94. Author interview with former projectionist Zheng Yaoyu in Zhejiang,

Juin 2019.

95. Articles from Dianying fangying [Film projection], Non. 2 (1957): 17; et

Non. 4 (1957): 40.

96. Wang Xinpeng, 149 (account from rural Anhui).
97. See Tang Hongxiang, 11 (account from Wenzhou). In my interview with
a former projectionist in rural Hubei in summer 2015, his wife interjected to
say that she never had time to watch the films because she was cooking for
guests. In another interview I conducted in Zhejiang, the former party secretary
of a mountainous village recounted frequent opportunities to see films at cadre
réunions, whereas his wife could not remember watching a single film.

98. Marks, 162.
99. Sobchack, 56, 84.
100. “Zhongnan zhaokai nongcun dianying yu huandeng faxing fangying
huiyi” [Central-South region conference on rural film and lantern slide distri-
bution and exhibition], Dazhong dianying [Mass cinema], Non. 6 (1965): 23.

101. “Dianying zai nongcun” [Cinema in the countryside], Dazhong dian –
ying [Mass cinema], Non. 4 (1964): 22–23; and “Jiantiao huandengji, laidao
qunzhong zhong” [Carry a slide projector on a shoulder pole and arrive amidst
the masses], Dazhong dianying [Mass cinema], Non. 2–3 (1965): 44.

102. “Nongye zhanxian shang de wenhua jianbing—Ji Hebei sheng Laishui
xian ‘san jiemei’ dianying fangyingdui” [Cultural vanguards on the agricultural
front—On the “Three Sisters” movie team from Laishui County, Hebei
Province], Zhongguo funü [Chinese women], Non. 1 et 2 (1965).

103. Thomas Lamarre, “Magic Lantern, Dark Precursor of Animation,»

Animation 6, Non. 2 (2011): 127–48.

104. Wu Hehu, “Liening zai yijiuyiba: Zhifeng jian de dianying” [Lenin in
1918: Movie between the fingers], in Jiyi wencong: Liushi niandai jiyi
[Recollections: Memories of the 1960s], éd. Zhu Yong (Beijing: Zhongguo wen-
lian chubanshe, 2002), 127–9.

105. Hai Peng, interviews with a village bricklayer (b. 1962) and a village

teacher (b. 1969) in Ningxia, Avril 2017.

106. Wang Xinpeng, 149 (account from Anhui); and Lian Xiaohua, 157–58

(account from Qinghai).
107. Yao Juntao, 378.
108. Xu Xiaoli (b. 1953), answer to the author’s questionnaire on “your most

memorable moviegoing experiences,” November 2016.
109. Wang Xinpeng, 145–48 (account from Anhui).
110. Cao Xiu, You yizhong qianshou jiao wennuan [A kind of handholding

called warmth] (Hohhot: Neimenggu renmin chubanshe, 2009), 48.

111. Wang Xinpeng, 145 (account from Anhui).
112. Yu Liang, 219 (account from the Beijing suburbs).
113. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 94.

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114. Tang Hongxiang, 11 (account from Wenzhou); and Hai Peng, interviews

with villagers in Ningxia, Avril 2017.

115. Bei Yan, 102 (account from Gansu).
116. The groping of young women at open-air cinema is dramatized in both
Joan Chen’s 1998 film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, set in the steppes of
Sichuan in the mid-1970s, and Jiang Wen’s 2007 film The Sun Also Rises, ensemble
in the summer of 1976, somewhere in East China. Audiences I interviewed in
rural Hubei and Zhejiang as well as Shanghai also mentioned the prevalence of
sexual harassment in passing. Reports of bodily clashes at rural cinema appear
in Liu Guangyu, 213–14.

117. For an example of how excluded audiences tried to sneak into an
“internal screening” in Chinese cities, see Li Yabai Yi Meng, Shishang wushi –
nian: Baixing shenghuo wushinian wangshi huishou [Fashions of the last fifty
années: Looking back on everyday lives] (Hohhot: Neimenggu renmin chuban-
elle, 1999), 222.

118. Hunan Provincial Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, “Guanyu
nongcun dianying fangyingdui shoufei wenti de baogao” [Report on the issue
of charging for film by rural movie teams], Dianying fangying [Film projection],
Non. 7 (1963): 9–13.

119. Par exemple, see Guangxi Film Distribution and Exhibition Company,
52, 54. Also see Bian Zhenhu, Ai zai Dunhuang [Love in Dunhuang] (Beijing:
Zuojia chubanshe, 2007), 34.

120. For two case studies from Southwest China of rural film exhibition
from the 1980s to the 2010s, see Liu Guangyu; and Yu Ji et al., Quxian dianying
shichang tianye diaocha [District and county film market fieldwork investiga-
tion] (Beijing: Zhongguang chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2009).

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Li | The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema

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